Everyone is dressed funnily. Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, for instance, is in a green and gold gladiator outfit, with a tiara on his head and a single white sock on his right foot that’s pulled up to his knee. Rohini Rau, dressed in dungarees, has a yellow plastic cup perched on her head and red ribbons around her pony tails. Abishek Joseph George sports a school tie and perfectly-round glasses, and has three strands of hair that stand on end under his bright red beanie. As Hilary Chaplain, the trainer leading this particularly colourful clown workshop, walks around the room, she looks at Egypt Dinesh, dressed like a school child with a fake pot belly, and says, “That’s a great addition to your costume,” and adds as an after thought, “I hope it’s a girl.” And the entire room dissolves into giggles.
It’s Day Four of the 12-day Medical Clown Course organised by The Little Theatre and the energy among the 12 actors who are part of it is infectious. They cackle madly, they wail comically, they wiggle their bellies and jiggle their butts, and leave no holds barred as they get their clown on.
“These guys are really good at making each other laugh,” smiles Hilary from New York, master trainer of medical clowning. In the city to conduct the first medical clown training programme in Chennai, she’s teaching actors classic clowning tools and introducing them to gag structures, on which they can improvise and build their own content. “People have an idea about clowns sporting garish make-up, acting stupid… I’m changing those misconceptions and teaching them how a clown’s mind works.” To demonstrate, she picks herself up and throws herself out of the room, she trips like she doesn’t mean to and she cackles on cue till everyone else is cackling too. “I’d been working as a clown for a long time before I realised I was one,” she laughs.
Hilary grew up in a small town in New Hampshire. By the time she was 10, she had decided that she wanted to do theatre. She studied Theatre Arts and went on to train under mime artist Tony Montanaro, which opened her up to popular theatre. Along the way, she met many artistes who were doing original work and was offered clown roles. “I never wanted to be a clown! I wanted to be a serious actress!” Eventually though, she threw up her arms and just decided to do a clown show. It’s then that she understood the art of clowning. “It’s a serious art form and reaches deeper than many others. Also, I like making people laugh,” says Hilary. She realised, though, that her clown didn’t belong in a circus. So, when she was invited to work at the Big Apple Circus Hospital Clown Program in 1987, she accepted the offer even though it wasn’t something she planned to do until then. Back then, there was no training. So, with eight years of clowning experience under her belt, she just learned as she watched. “You see some pretty difficult things in a hospital and I’ve had my moments,” she says, adding that she’s gotten close to children who have passed away and has worked with many others with agonising medical conditions and burns. But that’s not all there is to it — be it soothing a child who’s just got an injection, distracting parents and hospital staff who are in distress, or bringing a few moments of peace to a child who is confined to a hospital bed… the joys, she says, are many. “The kids may not always laugh; but as they watch you, you take them out of the hospital for a while and let them come back to who they are.”
In 1994, she started working as an adjunct professor of clowning at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She stopped after eight years, once she started touring to teach and perform physical comedy at festivals around the world and was even in Delhi at the Ishara Puppet Festival, 2012. She loves performing to audiences around the world, but, she says, “It gets lonely performing by myself. I’m ready to do collaborations now.”
Her current trip has mostly kept her shuttling between eight-hour practice sessions, hospitals and her hotel room. “This is the longest workshop I’ve ever done… I’m helping them create a group and start a programme here.” Since a medical clown’s routine is often guided by the child, it requires a lot of improvisational work, something the actors in the troop are adept at. “They are going to get really good at what they are doing; I can see that. And once hospitals see the fun and relief they bring, we hope it’ll create more work,” says Hilary. And even as the summer sun sets on the city and the lights flicker on in The Little Theatre playhouse, the actors pair up to give their own spin to a classic clown routine. They sing, dance, use music, magic and puppetry… and even though this is serious work, it’s still a laugh riot!
Hospitals looking to hire medical clowns on a remunerative basis can contact The Little Theatre. For details, call 96771 25738.
